1) What is Green or Eco Fashion? Is Sustainable Fashion the same?
Sustainable fashion is both: made environmentally friendly (green) and under fair conditions
2) What is an environmentally friendly fabric?
E.g. Tencel (fibres made in a closed-loop process from wood), cotton uses a lot of water and pesticides, rain fed organic cotton is better.
3) How can the fashion industry impact the environment negatively?
All along the value chain: Production of fibres (natural and synthetic), many chemicals in the production (fire retardant, dye, anti wrinkle, waterproof...), use and pollution of water, waste of clothes
4) Do the big fashion brands really have bad labour conditions?
Not easy to answer. There are differences but in general the working conditions and wages are bad. E.g. a textile worker in Bangladesh often hast to work up to 16 hours a day, 7days a week for something like 30€. That is not enough for a living in Bangladesh either. Child labour, sexual harassment are quite frequent problems.
5) How durable are sustainable produced clothes?
That depends of course on the brand. In my opinion you should only call items sustainable that are or durable or decompose easily. The idea of sustainable and slow fashion is that we consume less and better articles that are made under eco-friendly and fair conditions. We can use them longer and by that remarkably reduce waste.
INTERVIEW WITH Katharina Andrés
Sustainable Fashion Expert
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